• PROMO Magazine, Friday, August 4, 2006 1:15 PM

In a case of user-generated content sparking a real marketing effort, candy maker Perfetti Van Melle is running a promotional contest. It's based on now-famous home videos involving the company's Mentos brands. Not long ago, a homemade video began making the Internet rounds that showed a Mentos mint dropped into a liter-bottle of soda, causing a chemical reaction that made the beverage bubble furiously and shoot out of the bottle. The result was a pop-culture fad. Thousands of people created and posted short films of their own geyser experiments on sites like YouTube, Yahoo video and Revver.com. Now, the company has decided to stage the Mentos Geyser Video Contest, in which consumers submit a video of their own geyser to vie for a grand-prize package of 1,000 iTunes downloads and a year's supply of Mentos. "People are already embracing the brand through the craze," says Tom Baer, promotion strategy expert for Mentos ad agency Launch Creative Marketing. "Turning it into a contest will just add to their desire to interact with the brand." In today's market, he notes, the content-is-king adage has been transformed into consumer-created content is king. "You have to take advantage of opportunities when they come along," he says.

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